The Job Search in Perth, Australia

Working in Perth offers lots of chances for qualified expats like you. Western Australia’s largest metro area has a growing demand for overseas labor. Our guide to working in Perth provides an economic profile, tips for job hunting, and useful hints on networking and local working conditions.

If you are interested in finding a job in Western Australia, especially Perth, the constant demand for qualified employees in the region means that there is a wealth of job-related resources available online.

If you consider settling in Australia on a permanent basis, you need professional qualifications and experience relevant to either the entire country or a particular state or territory. Therefore make sure to check the so-called skilled occupation lists. They are updated annually by the national government as well as the individual state governments, and they detail the jobs that may qualify you for a skilled migration visa to Australia.

Even if you don’t want to settle in Perth forever, these lists – especially the latter – give you a good idea which jobs are sought after on the national or regional labor market.

Qualifications and Skills Assessment for Working in Perth

Unfortunately, having acquired professional skills in your home country does not mean that your training and work experience will be immediately recognized worldwide. A certificate or diploma from Prague or Passau may be considered just a piece of paper in Perth. For this reason, you should explore the occupation profiles provided by the career center of Western Australia.

Choose the job title that best describes your current occupation and find out all about the respective occupation in Perth and Western Australia: job prospects, average salaries, working conditions, and most importantly, a succinct overview of the education required to work in such a job in Perth.

If you think that your previous training encompasses the necessary skills and professional knowledge, you should get in touch with the Overseas Qualification Unit of Western Australia. Talk to them about a formal qualification assessment. In this way, you can prove to potential employers in Perth that you have the right background for the position.

Overseas Qualifications Unit

How to Find Job Vacancies in Perth

Once you know that your occupation is in demand in the Perth metro area and that you have the proper qualifications for working in Western Australia, you can begin with the job hunt as such.

Even before you arrive in Australia, networking with other members of your trade or industry can give you a huge boost. Many vacancies are not advertised on the open market if the HR department can find a suitable candidate via personal business contacts. So think about joining the respective industry association for your field of work. The official occupation profiles for Western Australia also feature important institutions and associations.

In addition to joining a business association, you can go looking for a job in the traditional way, i.e. by checking out the classifieds sections of major newspapers or clicking through online job portals. If you are searching for open positions in Perth, these are the papers and websites you should look into:

Working Conditions in Western Australia

Once you have found a suitable job in Perth, you may want to know more about working conditions. Full-time employees usually work 38 hours per week, with a legal right to overtime compensation. However, this does not apply to executive or management positions.

As far as vacations are concerned, you have a legal minimum of four weeks’ leave as well as ten more days of paid personal leave, e.g. in case of sickness. Moreover, you have Western Australia’s ten public holidays off as well.

Working parents may be happy to hear that the Australian government has introduced 18 weeks of parental leave, paid by the state, for every baby born after January 1, 2011. From January 1, 2013, the program includes another two weeks of Dad and Partner Pay for those parents who aren’t the baby’s primary caregiver.

If you’d like to read up on Australia’s business culture or topics like taxation and pension funds, please refer to our article on working in Australia for further details.

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